Massively Multiplayer Mashup

CBS Sports presents the World of Warcraft

In the first of four hour-long specials, Intel's World Series of Video Games will air on CBS this Sunday, showcasing coverage from video game competitions held in the United States and Sweden. Blizzard's World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will headline the event, with three-on-three PVP Arena battles serving as the format. Teams will be competing for a total of $90,000 in prizes.

For those who have the time to manage an MMO account as well as enjoy other games, Harmonix's Guitar Hero II and EA Sports' Fight Night Round 3 will also be featured on the program.

Catch all the action this Sunday, July 29, at 12pm EST/9pm PST. In the meantime, check out a trailer for the show on the WSVG website.

Blizzard presents its mad community

Earlier this week the popular South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" was nominated for an Emmy in the category of Outstanding Animated Program. The episode centers around a powerfully annoying World of Warcraft player who repeatedly kills South Park characters Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny. The South Park production team collaborated with Blizzard on the project, with the developers providing the character models and alpha servers used to shoot the required custom machinma animations.

Ancillary story content, or "lore" as some like to call it, has also contributed to the power of Blizzard's branding. Announced this week was a Warcraft comic book series from DC Comics. The run will be written by Walter Simonson, with art by Ludo Lullabi and Sandra Hope. In another expansion of story, a short narrative written by Blizzard's Micky Neilson was published on the World of Warcraft website. Titled "Unbroken," the work tells the history of a tragic draenei hero named Vindicator Nobundo.

Finally, this weekend marks the last respite before the onslaught of BlizzCon 2007. For those wondering, I will be there covering the show for the Shack, bringing you tales of every Murloc-costumed character and sword-wielding terrorist. I just hope they let me in with a laptop: Blizzard has posted a warning to attendees listing a few notable restricted items, as well as a survival guide.

Richard Garriott: "Grinding is a bad sign."

Referring to MMOs that focus on a damage-over-time model of combat as "data management" games, Garriott criticized several conventions of the genre, hoping that his own efforts would inspire other developers.

"The fact that people use the nomenclature 'grinding' to describe what they do in online games is a bad sign," he said, according to Gamasutra. "Missions have been reduced to taking the next pellet from the slot machine."

As anyone who has spent time in the Barrens zone of World of Warcraft knows, it is difficult to convey an epic sense of atmosphere and story in the midst of a hundred chaotic players chatting about Naruto. Few players have enough time and/or pride to immerse themselves in a role-playing sense, and so the fantastical worlds that MMO players inhabit are instantly broken by our intrusion.

Touching on the topic of NPC usage in MMOs, Garriott condemned the assumption that other players alone would provide an adequately interesting world.

"NPCs are largely ignored in MMOGs. This reduces overall immersion," he remarked. In Destination Games' Tablua Rasa, NPCs are constantly on the move amongst and around players, taking part in battles and providing in-depth storylines within instanced spaces.

Garriott also spoke to the financial necessity of publishers such as NCsoft providing a wide variety of MMOs: "Churn is inevitable. Churn is our friend. Most online players have moved onto another game within 10 months, and we've worked out it costs around $100 to attract a player to your game in the first place. You need to have more than one product available."

Auran launches Fury preview

I took a look at Fury in a recent preview, and found it to be a somewhat polished, if rather predictable effort. If your favorite aspect of World of Warcraft is the Battlegrounds combat, and you've grown tired of waiting for Blizzard to add another map to its offerings, Fury may be worth checking out.